Traditional Catholics and secular culture

Started by Arvinger, January 01, 2018, 11:50:07 AM

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Greg

I find the above about as dull as 72 virgins.

Give me death.
Contentment is knowing that you're right. Happiness is knowing that someone else is wrong.

Mono no aware

Greg, you are one odd duck.  Why wouldn't you enjoy a virtual reality world?  I remember there was a thread on this forum once where someone asked, "what do you think heaven will be like?" and I thought it was interesting because some of the responses were along the lines of what humans might like to create as virtual realities.  I seem to remember one of your answers was vaguely Mormon-esque-cum-video-game-ish, where you imagined that you might be given your own corner of the universe, and you could just blow up planets all day for fun.  You could have that in a virtual reality.

I don't think the Islamic version of heaven is actually all that dull.  I think the seventy-two virgins bit is mockable, of course.  (Why do they have to be virgins?  And why only seventy-two?)  But essentially it's just "all the sensual delights of earth, uninterrupted by suffering, forever."  That seems like a universally human longing.

nmoerbeek

Quote from: Pon de Replay on January 04, 2018, 01:49:34 PM
Greg, you are one odd duck.  Why wouldn't you enjoy a virtual reality world?  I remember there was a thread on this forum once where someone asked, "what do you think heaven will be like?" and I thought it was interesting because some of the responses were along the lines of what humans might like to create as virtual realities.  I seem to remember one of your answers was vaguely Mormon-esque-cum-video-game-ish, where you imagined that you might be given your own corner of the universe, and you could just blow up planets all day for fun.  You could have that in a virtual reality.

I don't think the Islamic version of heaven is actually all that dull.  I think the seventy-two virgins bit is mockable, of course.  (Why do they have to be virgins?  And why only seventy-two?)  But essentially it's just "all the sensual delights of earth, uninterrupted by suffering, forever."  That seems like a universally human longing.

Well I would say it is an acknowledgement of one of the concupiscences we have from the fall and original sin.  One of my favorite St. Bernard sayings is "Soft living makes one dainty hard work makes men hungry ".  Stomachs can only hold so much food comfortably and beyond that is misery, bodies can only engage in coupling so much and then suffer the consequences of too much friction and exertion and so on. 

I think that a matrix like experience where we can have whatever sensual thing (food, drink, smell) we want whenever we want it will lead to an increase of depression after people find out how empty sensual euphoria becomes.
"Let me, however, beg of Your Beatitude...
not to think so much of what I have written, as of my good and kind intentions. Please look for the truths of which I speak rather than for beauty of expression. Where I do not come up to your expectations, pardon me, and put my shortcomings down, please, to lack of time and stress of business." St. Bonaventure, From the Preface of Holiness of Life.

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Greg

Because I want to blow up real planets with a real Death Star.  I'm a corporal being.  I like getting down and dirty.  I like the shock wave on my chest when stuff blows up.  I like it when you are swimming in the ocean and a massive wave picks you up and nearly kills you by churning you around, but you struggle against it and live to tell the tail.  At those moments you feel most alive.

I don't want to be Captain Christopher Pike in a cage, like some zoo animal.  I want to be Jim Kirk, risking it all on one turn of pitch and toss.  Jim Kirk is a much more interesting character.

If you retained your humanity then you'd always know it was a make-believe world.  If you lost your humanity then you've lost everything.  It doesn't matter how much "fun" it is if it is not me experiencing it.  That's why I would never take drugs.

Why did Jesus get His transfigured body back?  The other two members of the Trinity don't need a body, why does Jesus?  Presumably He wanted it back again because in some important way it defined Him.
Contentment is knowing that you're right. Happiness is knowing that someone else is wrong.

Tales

Quote from: Pon de Replay on January 04, 2018, 11:54:40 AM
I don't see how this could possibly be the case—because even if it is, as soon as you concede it, you've given away the game: any bar that the Church sets, you now know you only have to go, say, half as far.  And then five hundred years later your descendants in the faith might be snickering at you: "they went half as far, but let's be realistic, humans are prone to degeneracy so the Church overcompensated.  Really, you only have to go a fourth as far as that."  It's relativism; and then the minute we admit it's relativism, it slides into meaninglessness.  If the whole point of the Church Fathers having these disciplines was all just a psychological trick, then why do moderns get treated to seeing the card up the sleeve, while the Christians of antiquity had to take it at face value?  I am almost tempted to feel sorry for the Early Christians for being duped in this manner.  But I don't, and they probably wouldn't want me to, because their stars burned incomparably bright and will last for as long as memory, while bourgeois Christianity is and will always be something of a laughingstock.

There is relativism, and then there is relativism.  One type of relativism says you think murder is bad but I think its dandy, you cannot tell me I am wrong.  Another type of "relativism" says God will judge us each individually taking into account who we are.  I think of how a specific action is a mortal sin for person X but perhaps not for person Y.

We are called to be perfect as God the Father is perfect.  This is impossible - it must be setting Him up as a role model for us to strive for, but with full knowledge that its clearly impossible.  Why is this example of "relativism" ok but not others?  I use scare quotes because I do not consider it relativism.

Jacob

#185
Quote from: Pon de Replay on January 04, 2018, 01:09:58 PM
It would be more like the movie Strange Days, only instead of people having brief rushes of VR excitement, it would be a non-stop euphoria.

Inception, the scene where Leo's character is shown the 'opium den' where people sleep all day in the dream state where they can do anything they want.

And I agree with PdR overall, apocalypse or singularity/transhumanism.
"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time."
--Neal Stephenson

Mono no aware

#186
Quote from: Davis Blank - EG on January 04, 2018, 05:50:05 PMThere is relativism, and then there is relativism.  One type of relativism says you think murder is bad but I think its dandy, you cannot tell me I am wrong.  Another type of "relativism" says God will judge us each individually taking into account who we are.  I think of how a specific action is a mortal sin for person X but perhaps not for person Y.

We are called to be perfect as God the Father is perfect.  This is impossible - it must be setting Him up as a role model for us to strive for, but with full knowledge that its clearly impossible.  Why is this example of "relativism" ok but not others?  I use scare quotes because I do not consider it relativism.

Understood.  I was speaking of a relativism where a discipline is deemed necessary in one age, and unnecessary in another.  I agree that the example you have given here is indeed not relativism, because as you say, being as perfect as God is impossible.  It was always unambiguously viewed as "a model to strive for," as you well put it; Pope Leo XIII in the nineteenth century took the same meaning from it as St. Clement of Alexandria did in the second.  If any Catholic ever taught that someone could be and had to be as perfect as God, god-like themselves, then such a teacher was probably excommunicated for heresy.

But it's different when it comes to disciplines.  The passage from Scripture that I was discussing with Jayne is a good example.  In 1 Timothy, St. Paul says that women should be adorned with "modesty and sobriety," and in giving examples of what not to wear, he lists pearls and fancy clothes and styled hair.  This passage has two problems.  If what St. Paul meant was merely "dress simply; you get the idea," then it is curious that he used particulars, instead of the more generalized phrasing which could be read accordingly from culture to culture and age to age, and not get future generations bogged down in semantic controversies over pearls.  Secondly, the Early Church Fathers took the particulars seriously, and not only that, but further, they found the spirit of the passage to apply to all kinds of personal flash and vanity, not just pearls and styled hair, but things like make-up as well.

We now live in an era where Catholic women are permitted not only make-up, but also pearls and fancy clothes and styled hair.  Mind you, I am not blaming anyone in this age; it has been permitted for centuries.  And aesthetically I'm impartial.  I can see both sides.  There is an earthly allure indeed to make-up and jewelry and teased-out hair, yet then there is a transcendent and minimalist beauty to eschewing those things.  But from the Christian perspective I don't see how the latter could not be preferable, as it bespeaks a serene, unencumbered contemptus mundi and a keeping of one's conversation in heaven.  So relativism would have to be considered here, because the Fathers read it as both a stricture of specifics and a call to an even more devout simplicity, yet current Catholics accept it as merely rhetorical or inspirational, and wear all the things which St. Paul suggested they not.

Chestertonian

im just some guy on the internet who hasbt been to a real church in over a year or more msyvr 2years but never have I ever walked into a church and thought much either way about the women other than a general observation that they looked dowdy and frumpy

with an exception for the missus of course. 

and the missus spends a fair bit of time with fancy cosmetics from korea only to look like herself.  I barely notice unless it's the stuff that comes off when you're kissing.   8)  i don't notice a big difference

if the women were all coming to mass done up like the lady from the drew carey show i think the priest would say something
"I am not much of a Crusader, that is for sure, but at least I am not a Mohamedist!"

Mono no aware


Elizabeth

 
Quote from: JubilateDeo on January 01, 2018, 03:12:11 PM
Do you really want a church where no women wear makeup?  Does anyone really want to see that?
;D ;D ;D you darling young lady!